IHS Global Insight Perspective | |
Significance | New documentation has been released showing that Toyota had a strategy to deal with floor mat pedal entrapment issues as far back as 2007. Meanwhile, the NHTSA has announced that an unintended acceleration incident affecting a Prius in New York State has been proven as driver error. |
Implications | These documents are equally embarrassing for the NHTSA, which will face scrutiny as to why it did not challenge Toyota harder on the issue of pedal entrapment. The Prius incident in New York State is the first time that an unintended acceleration incident connected to the current recall crisis has been shown as driver error. |
Outlook | The release of these documents will put the handling of the Toyota unintended acceleration issue by the NHTSA under even more scrutiny. The discovery of driver error causing an unintended acceleration incident affecting a Prius follows the congressional committee refusing to allow Toyota to even consider this as a reason for at least some unintended acceleration incidents. |
More internal Toyota documents subpoenaed by the U.S. House of Representatives have been released to the public, according to a report by the Detroit News, supposedly revealing that Toyota had been crafting a plan to deal with a safety issue related to pedal entrapment as far back as 2007. The documents are five pages of emails between Toyota's top Washington representatives, Chris Santucci and Chris Tinto, and company officials in Japan. "NHTSA has apparently decided to demand further action from Toyota," Tinto wrote to top officials in Japan and the United States on 24 August 2007. "They claim this remains a serious issue, even subsequent to our mailings to Lexus owners. They recognize that this is a misuse issue [stacked mats], however they believe that something about the throttle pedal or floorplan design lends itself to easier jamming than other models produced in the past." Toyota recalled 55,000 floor mats the following month, instead of recalling vehicles themselves. A full recall to deal with this issue was not occur until August 2009, after the very public death of a California policeman and his family behind the wheel of a runaway Lexus ES sedan. But the emails also offer a look inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) attention to the issue as well. One NHTSA official, Jeff Quandt, "mentioned that they aren't sure that they want to spend a whole year investigating this issue," Santucci wrote in an August 2007 email, according to the Detroit Free Press. "If NHTSA doesn't want to spend a year on this, that means they want to speed up the process and possibly issue a recall request letter right away... They really don't have enough data to take that next step."
However, in more positive news for Toyota, the NHTSA has examined a Toyota Prius in New York State that reportedly experienced an unintended acceleration event, causing the vehicle to go out of control and smash into a stone wall, superficially injuring the driver (see United States: 10 March 2010: Two Reports of Out-of-Control Toyota Prius Hybrids Surface, No Fix Yet Ready—Report). "Information retrieved from the vehicle's onboard computer systems indicated there was no application of the brakes and the throttle was fully open," the NHTSA said last Thursday (18 March) in a statement about the crash. The NHTSA said that the results of the findings indicate that it was caused by driver error, and not machine fault. The 9 March crash was investigated by six technicians from Toyota and two from the NHTSA, and followed a similar event in California in which a 61-year-old driver of a 2008 Prius claimed that his car accelerated out of control on a California highway. In that instance as well, no fault was found with the car, with technicians unable to duplicate the fault that the driver said caused his issue.
Outlook and Implications
The NHTSA is apparently in nearly as much hot water as Toyota is over the investigations into the company's unintended acceleration issues, with Congress openly wondering why eight investigations into the issue since 2001 had all turned up empty until the final one in 2009 that led to the insistence that Toyota recall its vehicles. The NHTSA defended its actions in a statement last week, saying it had not found any safety defect in 2007 that would have allowed it to insist upon a broader fix than Toyota offered. "The investigation was contentious," the agency said in a statement. "NHTSA was concerned that the design of the Toyota all-weather mat increased the possibility that an incorrectly positioned mat could impede the accelerator pedal. After upgrading the investigation, and after many discussions and meetings with Toyota, the company remained resistant to recalling the floor mats, an action that NHTSA identified as essential to eliminating pedal entrapment." The NHTSA has been accused by Congress of not pursuing its responsibilities to the extent it should, but the agency has been consistently underfunded by Congress as well, leading to a vicious circle. Toyota documents have revealed a process of "negotiation" with the NHTSA to allow the automaker to only have to perform a component recall instead of a full vehicle recall, a fact that company staffers were proud of when they reported to incoming North American president Yoshimi Inaba in a now-infamous internal memo.
However, the agency's finding on the incident relating to Prius which suffered alleged unintended acceleration in New York State provides some respite from the constant bad news stories that have sullied Toyota's reputation over the past few months. At times it has been painful to watch Toyota struggling with a response to Congressional inquiries about what could be causing the 70% of complaints of unintended acceleration that are not obviously caused by mechanical fault. The most likely explanation is operator error, selecting the accelerator instead of the brake, as seems to be the case with the runaway New York Prius. But any attempt by the company to bring this up as a possibility was flatly (and angrily) rejected by Congressional Representatives during two days of hearings late last month, with Toyota even being instructed not to consider that as an option. With the NHTSA's findings now public as regards this one example, it may finally give Toyota some breathing room to suggest that it might not be an isolated example. Still, the company is likely to have to follow up with more investigations and more data to substantiate any claim that operator error is the cause of the company's widespread issues.